In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • An Interview with Peter Lehman and Linda Williams
  • Kevin John Bozelka (bio), Peter Lehman (bio), and Linda Williams (bio)

Peter Lehman is director of the Center for Film and Media Research and Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University, Tempe. He is editor of Pornography: Film and Culture. Linda Williams is a professor in the Departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California–Berkeley. She is the author of Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible and Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. She has also edited Porn Studies. Peter and Linda were interviewed by Kevin John Bozelka on 24 July 2006. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Kevin John Bozelka (KJB): I want to talk about different experiences with teaching porn. Peter, could you recount your rather horrifying story teaching porn at Arizona State?

Peter Lehman (PL): In 1999 I left the University of Arizona in Tucson for Arizona State in Tempe. I taught a course called "Sexuality in the Media," the same course that I had taught at the University of Arizona for six years with almost no problems at all. Now, it's very important to understand two things. When I came to Arizona State I came to build some kind of film program, so now I'm teaching in what is called the interdisciplinary humanities program. And I teach my course under the same title. I teach it the first two years I'm here, in the spring of 2000 and 2001. It's a grad and senior-level undergrad combined course, and it's very successful. I keep it a small course on purpose—a total of about fifteen students. There's a unit again on hard-core pornography.

KJB: Just to be clear, the course was not entirely on hard-core pornography.

PL: Correct, not entirely. There's one unit in the course on hard-core pornography, and we use Linda's book and show some of the films that go along with the different stages of how she looks at porn history. The way I always teach my class is in accordance with the way a lot of film programs work—we have screenings separate from lectures and discussion. The screenings are always done with just a projectionist and no faculty member at the screenings. That's the way the screenings were done for these classes.

KJB: Meaning you weren't there, Peter?

PL: That's right.

KJB: Why is that?

Linda Williams (LW): Big mistake [laughter].

KJB: That is actually a bit unusual to me.

PL: That's standard for the way that I've been teaching my film courses throughout my entire career. I never attend the screenings.

KJB: And why is that?

PL: I've had teaching assistants who are the projectionists for the classes. I do not introduce films, since I want the students to watch them as they would without looking for things they think I want them to look for or trying to understand the films from my perspective. There was no problem. Students loved the class. Then—and Linda knows about this because she was involved—a number of us who teach units or classes on pornography agreed to do an interview with the Boston Globe on pornography in college film classes. When that article came out it became of interest to some local people, including a very conservative newspaper in the Phoenix area called the East Valley Tribune. It was reprinted, with some minor modifications, in the Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic, which is the big Phoenix metropolitan area newspaper. It was actually doing the newspaper interview with the Globe that led to the problems that arose for me.

The East Valley Tribune did a classic yellow press kind of story, trying to stir up trouble where there wasn't any. [End Page 62] They came out with a front-page story with this huge graphic called "This Class Rated X," and that started all the attention. There were several extremely conservative state legislators that jumped into the act. The short version of this...

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